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Statements by an Artist, for the Palms of Strangers

For more than 30 years now, sharp-eyed New Yorkers have been finding them on ledges, windowsills and store counters — poker-chip-size coins that reveal themselves to be something far more mysterious than loose change.

The inch-wide ceramic discs, painted in iridescent colors, have the rough, weathered feel of ancient treasure. Each is embossed with a short, cryptic message, a year and two humble letters: “bw.”

Those, it turns out, are the initials of Beriah Wall, a Brooklyn artist who estimates he has knocked out hundreds of thousands of these handmade tokens since the late 1970s, quietly dropping them in public places or the hands of bewildered strangers. His latest batch, minted over the last few months, carry the message “Stuck in Brkln.”

They are anything but. Mr. Wall, 63, said his homemade currency had shown up all over the world. He has passed many of the pieces to friends and relatives, who have scattered them from California to Africa and from the Caribbean to Tibet.

In the realm of the coin, Mr. Wall is a sovereign, producing anonymous art that is encountered in random, intimate moments. The phrases he stamps on the front and back include wordplay like Flee/Flea and Real/Good and political statements like Bush/Gush and Palestine/Israel.

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The ceramic tokens Beriah Wall makes in the basement studio of his Brooklyn home are stamped with his initials, the year they are made and phrases of his choosing. Mr. Wall began making them after announcing his 1977 marriage with similarly fashioned hearts.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

“My work has been in millions of hands,” he said. “It’s a little free object that sort of floats around. It’s about small endeavors, the edge of meaning or significance. If you’d like some to take wherever, I got a carload for you.”

Mr. Wall was a potter in Vermont when he conceived the idea of giving away small chunks of ceramics. He was manning the parking lot at a crafts fair, charging $2 per car. The fee did not go over well with customers, who wondered why they had to pay anything to park in a field.

“I sliced out little pieces of clay squares and gave them to people,” he said. “And they all liked it. They smiled. It was immediate. So, bada-bing, I ran with it.”

The coins started coming soon after he married his wife, Janice, in 1977. (The ceramic hearts that announced their wedding lasted longer than the union.) They moved to New York and settled into a loft on Franklin Street — and no, he did not name the place the Franklin Mint. As he pursued his dream of becoming an artist, painting oils and creating large sculptures, he found that the coins set him apart.

“Back then people were doing big stuff on a grand scale,” he said. “The only way to compete was to go the other way. Think of the intimacy. You can go to a gallery to look at a piece of art. Here, you have a little gallery in your palm.”

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Poker-chip-size clay coins made by Beriah Wall, a Brooklyn artist. Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

He tosses away most of the coins, simply dropping them along the way wherever his day takes him. His gifts to strangers almost always elicit a smile.

“They upend your expectations, with an aspect of positive subversion,” said Mr. Frank, who is also the senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum in California. “That’s my favorite kind of art. They do not redefine art. They redefine life. They don’t make you think about ceramics in a new way. They make you think about coins in new ways.”

They have not, however, put any real money into Mr. Wall’s bank account. To finance his art, he has worked as a plasterer, doing high-end work in Manhattan and on Long Island. His walls have washes of color — some bold, others faded. The inspiration for the look came to him by accident, when some pigment fell into a bucket of plaster.

“You have a wall, you have color, so why not do color on the wall?” he said. “It was a good way to get fired.”

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Both sides of some of Mr. Wall’s coins. Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

But slowly the style caught on, as clients looking for something different were referred to him. Some of the apartments Mr. Wall plastered are now featured in shelter magazines, where the walls look like minimalist paintings.

“Is it art?” he asked. “What else would it be? Art is to make, and I like to make. To step back from a glistening, fresh wall is satisfaction. Why argue?”

Now semiretired from plastering, Mr. Wall continues to strike his coins — he can make 2,000 in a week — in the basement studio of his Red Hook home. Little clay blanks rest in a bucket on the table, where a plank is splattered with green and yellow streaks of paint. A kiln that looks like a coffee maker on steroids is off to the side. When he has something new to say, he carves his message into a cup-shaped plaster mold, then stamps each clay disc by hand.

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Upstairs, coins are piled into buckets and bowls, all the easier to grab on the way out the door. Words peek out from the pile: Bling, Made, Good, Real, Pro, To Have, To Hold. Somehow, he said, they add up to one big statement.

“In the long run, there is a kind of unity,” he said. “It’s like the blind man touching the elephant. I’ve touched the elephant in a lot of places. I’m just not sure what it looks like yet.”

The big phrase last year was a nod to the economy: Income/Outcome. This year he has been playing with Stuck in/Brkln.

“I had an uncle who said there were two things he never wanted — to be a banker and to live in Brooklyn,” Mr. Wall explained. “He ended up doing both. I came to New York with stars in my eyes thinking I’d hit it big, and here I am, stuck in Brooklyn.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2010, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Statements By an Artist, For the Palms Of Strangers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe